Few films put us on edge so quickly. Arthur
Hamilton (John Randolph) already seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown in
the opening scenes of Seconds (1966),
which follow the weary middle-aged bank executive on his train journey from
Grand Central Station to his suburban Scarsdale home. He may be followed. The
images seem taken from ankles or shoulders. Every space feels cavernous. The
organ score seems lifted from a Vincent Price horror picture. The opening
credits appear over images of gaping maws and distorted eyeballs, and if that
first eyeball close-up makes you think of Marion’s face on the bathroom floor in
Psycho (1960), you won’t be surprised
to learn that this credit sequence was, like Psycho’s, designed by Saul Bass.
The
director of Seconds was John
Frankenheimer. The film is regarded as the cap on his “paranoia trilogy,”
following The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) and Seven Days in May (1964).
The Cold War was at the forefront of those pictures, which dealt explicitly
with brainwashing and political assassination. In Seconds, that same
claustrophobic atmosphere is bleeding out of the seemingly everyday. Based on
David Ely’s eponymous novel and scripted by Lewis John Carlino, this story is
exceedingly intimate, even if it too alludes to something akin to a vast conspiracy.
Arthur’s nervous because he’s received a phone call from a friend he thought
dead. The friend is trying to help Arthur change his life—by changing his face,
his body, his voice, his name and occupation. By killing off Arthur. All it
takes is money, which Arthur has, and a corpse, which the company whose services
he will be obliged to solicit will take care of. This company seems to know
what Arthur wants, even if he doesn’t. Arthur is ushered to their headquarters
after being led through a meat packing plant, an all too apt analogue for the
company’s business of transfiguration. By the time they’re done with Arthur
he’ll look like Rock Hudson. Which is to say they change Arthur Hamilton into a
painter named Tony Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. It’s the heartthrob movie
star’s most startling and impressive performance. (Another interesting parallel
to Psycho: where that film had its
star vanish 40 minutes in, the star of Seconds
doesn’t appear until 40 minutes in.) Our hero makes a go at this new life.
He even finds himself a gorgeous younger lover (Salome Jens) to wipe out the
memories of the wife he could barely kiss anymore. But something about Tony
doesn’t quite take. Inside, he’s still Arthur. And this makes the company
uneasy.
The
collective desire for renewal at work in Seconds
had been made into story before—there is some crossover between it and Ray
Bradbury’s ‘Marionettes Inc.’—but Ely’s exploration of this perhaps
specifically American idea of total self-reinvention took this desire to a
sinister extreme. The film perfectly synthesizes the novel’s trajectory with
the tools of cinema. Brilliantly employing wide-angle lenses, James Wong Howe’s
endlessly inventive cinematography makes the familiar eerie, and the casting of
Hudson was a stroke of genius—thank god Frankenheimer didn’t get his first choice
of Laurence Olivier, whose performance would surely have felt studied and
possessed none of the despair and, ultimately, harrowing hysteria on display
here. Frankheimer’s casting of numerous blacklisted actors contributes to a meta-reading
that only increases a sense of condemnation of American falseness and
fear-driven values. As Alec Baldwin describes it in one of the supplements on
Criterion’s new edition of Seconds,
the film doesn’t invite you in—“it takes you hostage.”
